A real person wrote (most of) this column

A retired colleague texted the other day to ask if any of my students had used artificial intelligence to write their essays.

Honestly, I don’t know, but it’s certainly possible.

Artificially generated student work is a growing concern among educators, at least based on the number of emails I’ve received, discussions I’ve heard, and articles I’ve read in the past month alone.

The latest focus of the let’s-stay-one-step-ahead-of-student-dishonesty debate is ChatGPT, a program from OpenAI that “generates human-like responses in a conversational context,” a line that was itself generated by the ChatGPT program when I asked it to write an essay about the topic.

Like many a penny ante dictator, the chatbot referred to itself in the third person as it explained that “as it interacts with users, it can improve its understanding of language and become more adept at generating appropriate responses.”

Chatbots themselves are nothing new. Chances are good that you’ve communicated with them through the online customer service departments of large companies like AT&T or Starbucks. Or whenever you’ve asked Siri what song is playing on the radio.

Education has a long history of bucking new trends in technology on the grounds that they are bad for learning. I was a student during the calculator wars of the late ’70s and early ’80s, when administrators and teachers couldn’t decide if the device was the savior or antichrist.

Before that, teachers debated erasable pens, and before even that, fountain pens. In the dim past, the profession no doubt criticized the written word itself because it short-circuited memorization.

Still, ChatGPT and programs like it are enough to give even the most progressive educator pause. As a test, I asked it to write an essay about student mental health, using scholarly sources. In less than a minute, it spit out a 466-word response that referenced the World Health Organization and the American College Health Association.

Sources were both paraphrased and quoted directly. Full citations, in pristine American Psychological Association format, were included at the end of the piece.

More importantly, however, the writing itself was sharp and clean, integrating the outside evidence in a way that I work hard to instill in students throughout the semester.

So, am I worried about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs in the classroom?

Of course, but not overly so.

For one thing, the new technology speaks to the importance of something most language arts teachers I know are doing already: flipping the classroom. This means students write while they are at school, under the guidance of teachers who help them formulate claims and integrate evidence (and who monitor that the work is the students’ own).

Additionally, the issue emphasizes the need for more student choice in selecting topics. Students who are intrinsically invested in a topic are more likely to complete their own research and do their own writing, versus students who are mandated to write about things in which they have little interest.

The current kerfuffle also speaks to the necessity of ongoing conversations with students about what AI can do and what it cannot. When I made a second attempt to have ChatGPT generate a response (write a 500-word essay on the lack of effectiveness of current animal welfare laws in Ohio), the results were less promising. Sentences were awkward and repetitive, and the argument was presented in the stilted five-paragraph-essay style (albeit in six paragraphs).

Still, it probably would earn a passing grade in most classrooms.

Financial Times notes that student access to ChatGPT means colleges and universities — I would add junior high and high schools — need to become more creative in their assessments. Not every course or topic needs a formal essay for a final project.

What won’t work is doubling down on originality-detection software like Turnitin or trying to ban programs like ChatGPT. The first does nothing but enrich the coffers of the same people who develop transgressive programs in the first place; the second is like trying to close the barn door after the horse is already out.

That last sentence ends with a cliche, maybe the best proof that some of us are still doing our writing the old-fashioned way.

To see the full chatbot responses mentioned above, click here. 

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

(I originally wrote this for the Dec. 21 edition of The Alliance Review in Alliance, Ohio.) 

Teachers' opening salvo sets tone for students

Few topics create more angst for teachers than the First Day Lesson.

If you have educators in your life, you know they’ve been thinking about how to start the coming school year since flipping the calendar to August, if not before.

The teaching profession, for the most part, endorses the philosophy that well begun is well done, that whatever happens on the first day sets the stage for every moment of the rest of the year. So that first lesson has to be sharp like cheddar. Or an obsidian knife. Don’t just break the ice in class, slice through it.

One of the most common icebreakers is the Candy Trick, where the teacher stands at the door with a bag of sweets (shades of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”) and tells students to take as many pieces as they’d like. Only later do students discover they must share one fact about themselves for each piece.

A variation is the Toilet-Paper Trick, where the teacher substitutes a roll of (unused) teepee for the candy and has students roll off as many squares as they want. Then they have to write something about themselves on each square.

Teachers either love to share their first-day lessons or guard them like Gollum, stroking their origami notecards or glitter-covered snowflakes and crooning, “My precious! My precious!”

The sharers post everywhere, all over Facebook and social media, during staff meetings and to complete strangers in office-supply stores. They are proud of their intricate charts to ensure that every student will speak to every other student on the first day, or that each kid will contribute a block to a quilt on the wall.

I’m not immune to shenanigans on the first day, but not terribly original either. For the last few years, I’ve relied on the Notecard Trick, giving one to each student and having them answer some moderately gonzo questions about themselves − least favorite food, a color they’ve always wanted to dye their hair, a song they never want to hear again, etc. The only thing they can’t put on the card is their name.

Then I collect the cards, shuffle, and hand them back out. Students must find the owner of the card I give them, have a conversation and introduce that person to the rest of the class.

One thing teachers, myself included, often don’t consider is how First Day Lessons affect introverts. Sure, outgoing kids will love to rattle off 47 fun facts about themselves on 47 sheets of toilet paper or introduce a fellow student who hates linguine, but what about those who find such classroom antics painful? Or who have been subjected to them multiple times on the same day?

Edutopia, a website from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, offers different questions for teachers to ask at the start of the year. 

They are: 

1. What helps you feel welcomed?
2. How do you like to be greeted?
3. What strengths do you bring to the classroom? The school?
4. What do you like most about school so far? What could change?

These are a great foundation, either in addition to a rousing game of Two Truths and a Lie or in place of it. They give students lots of room to navigate, so what teachers learn might be more significant than the last show they binge-watched on Netflix.

A final point about first-day activities − or first days in general − is that it’s OK if they don’t go perfectly for teachers or students. Trying to make them flawless is part of why everybody is so jittery in August.

Most school years have 180 days. While the first is important, so are the other 179. One thing all teachers can model is a willingness to admit that yesterday didn’t go so well, but they’re back at it today, learning from what went right and what went wrong, even if the latter happened on the over-hyped first day.

That’s not always something that fits on a square of toilet paper, even if you write really really small.

Please don't give teachers guns

In the wake of the Uvalde tragedy, an old idea has gained new currency: Arming teachers.

For Americans seduced by the rhetoric that “all it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” giving teachers firearms makes sense. Potential shooters would take into consideration that a certain percentage of the faculty and staff are carrying and would think twice before targeting a school.

If an attacker did get inside — and mistakes in Uvalde (a door propped open, a complete breakdown of the police command structure) show how easily it can happen and how much carnage can result — then kids and teachers would not be sitting ducks. The teacher could transition from long division or phonics into law-enforcement mode and take out the intruder, to the cheers of her pupils.

But despite the comforting emotional resonance of such a scenario, giving teachers guns is a bad idea. Here’s why.

First of all, it puts more guns in schools. And if the proliferation of firearms in this country has demonstrated anything, it’s that where there are guns, there is a bigger temptation to use and misuse them. Handgun owners are much more likely to die from suicide by gun (men are eight times more likely, women are 35 times more likely), according to a Stanford research study. Accidental shootings are much more likely to happen in households with guns than in those without them.

It stands to reason, then, that the more staff members with guns, the more chances that somebody will get hurt. At the end of 2021, the Giffords Law Center released an updated report of gun accidents in schools. It included a teacher in California who mistakenly discharged his gun while teaching a class about gun safety; three students were injured, including one with ricocheted bullet fragments in his neck.

Most of the cases, based on a quick perusal, involve teachers, resource officers and visitors accidentally leaving weapons unattended, often in school restrooms. Prosaic, everyday stuff caused by complacency, but potential tragedies in the making.

Secondly, the risks involved would not be shared equally across the school population. Students of color are disciplined more often and more harshly than their European-American peers in many schools. Imagine the fear and anxiety for these black and brown students if they attended campuses where their teachers – 72% of whom, nationally, are white – carry weapons in the classroom. Given concerns about systemic racism, would these students be more likely than their peers to have weapons drawn against them when a discipline situation escalates?

Training is also an issue. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine supports a bill passed by the Ohio House last year that would lessen training requirements for teachers whose districts allow them to carry in the classroom.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that Ohio teachers who are allowed to carry must complete the same training as the state’s peace officers. DeWine’s – and the bill’s – intent is to relax that standard to the same training provided to a security guard (along with “local” coursework, whatever that means).*

The accuracy of even highly trained police officers suffers in real-life situations, where they hit their targets anywhere from 30% to 50% of the time. Imagine how much worse that could be for teachers, especially in a high-pressure situation involving a classroom shooter and cowering kids, against somebody who may be a former or current student, somebody with whom they have an educational and emotional investment.

It’s that last part that is – for this full-time classroom teacher at least – one of the biggest reasons not to arm educators. Carrying a gun is inimical to a main tenet of education, which is to model compassion, civility and reasoned debate. I don’t want to carry a gun in school, and I don’t want to worry about teaching alongside somebody who is.

Maybe I’m just resentful to live in a society where, for the benefit of some people’s hobby, the rest of us have to adopt military terms like “hardening” when discussing our public spaces, practice cowering in corners and under desks, and have deep discussions about which books are the best to throw at an intruder.

The solution cannot simply be “more guns.” That’s a non-answer that benefits only gun and ammunition manufacturers and a small minority of Americans willing to sacrifice the rest of us on the altar of their John Wayne fever dreams.

* – Incidentally, in what is surely a nominee for Worst Timing Ever, Ohio in mid-June will become the latest state to allow residents over the age of 21 to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Meet your new friend, kids

This piece originally ran in The Alliance Review on March 1, 2018, shortly after then-President Trump suggested that some teachers should be armed in the classroom . Sadly, lawmakers are resurrecting the same tired debate in 2022. 

Good morning, class. I’m Mrs. Rosenfeld.

Class, class? Please, pay attention.

As I said, I’m Mrs. Rosenfeld, and welcome to the sixth grade.

We have a new friend in class this year, and you can all see him on my hip. Yes, a gun. I am now licensed to carry this weapon in school because of certain awful things that have been happening in our country.

What sort of things? Well, some bad people have been getting into our schools and hurting students, so the president, and Congress — you know, the people who make the laws — and the NRA have decided that I am now responsible for protecting all of you with this weapon.

Excuse me, what’s that? Yes, you. Jason, right?

Oh, yes, Jason, the gun is loaded.

And you? Sierra, isn’t it?

Do I want to carry the gun? That’s a very good question, and I’m not sure I know how to answer it. See, I’m just a few years away from retirement, and my evaluations haven’t been so good lately, so I guess I felt like it was in my best interest to say yes when I was … “voluntold” to protect the entire sixth grade.

What is “voluntold”? You’re a little young to understand, but sometimes you volunteer to do things to help people, and sometimes you are told to volunteer or feel pressured to volunteer. Yes, like when your mommy and daddy make you rake your grandma’s leaves. That’s a terrific example, Jasmine.

Yes, you in the back — Freddy. Oh, great question. Freddy wants to know what a little gun like this will do against an AR-15, which is a much bigger gun that shoots a lot faster and has been used by some bad people to hurt students and teachers. (Freddy certainly knows his guns, doesn’t he?)

Well, Freddy, I don’t really know the answer to that, and I hope we never have to find out. They told me at gun-training school — yes, sometimes teachers go to school just like kids — that some of the best-trained professionals, like police officers, only hit their targets 30 percent of the time, and when the targets are shooting back, that drops to 18 percent, so I don’t know how’d I’d do in a situation like that, and I hope we never have to find out.

But if I ever tell you all to duck, then you duck, just like in the drills from last year, OK?

Another question, Sierra? You certainly are an inquisitive young lady.

I don’t seem excited about having this gun in class? Well, maybe excited isn’t the right word. I mean, I’m excited to teach you math, and when I was a little girl I used to dream about how exciting it would be to teach kids how to read. So, no, “excited” is not how I’d describe having this gun, especially when I have to keep track of it all day, even while I’m walking around your desks and bending down to help you figure out long division.

What’s that? You heard Mr. Bailey in the seventh grade really likes his gun? That’s nice, I suppose. And he likes to sometimes brush his hand across the holster when he makes assignments or disciplines his class? Hmm. Maybe that seems a little threatening, yes? No, it’s not? Oh, because he says it’s not — it’s just a habit he has. I see. Mr. Bailey told me at a faculty meeting last week that he imagines a day when some teachers will want to teach just so they can carry guns around kids because they really like them. Guns, that is, not kids. Although they probably will like kids too. I suppose.

Can you ask that again?

Oh, that’s a terrific question, Jerome. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to add more guns to make schools safer, does it? But the NRA tells us it is “counterintuitive.” That’s a big word that means “different than what you expect.” So if we add guns in each and every classroom in America, and use time in college that used to be spent teaching people how to be better teachers to show them how to load, unload and shoot, we will be making education better for every child.

Would I ever shoot a misbehaving child? Heavens no, Benjamin. What would ever make you ask such a question?

Oh, you overheard Mr. Bailey saying it in the hallway with another teacher. Well, I’m sure he was just kidding. After all, he had to be psychologically evaluated before he even went to gun school for teachers and before he got a bonus for carrying a weapon.

What’s a bonus?

Well, that leads us right into our first math lesson of the year. Now if you’ll all open your books to page seven, we can begin.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter